4 Essential Tips to Enhance Your Digital Employee Experience
First of all, what is Digital Employee Experience and why is it so important?
Employee experience (EX) is the sum of all an employee's experiences at a company. It can include cultural experiences with coworkers, leaders, and HR, physical workspace environments, and digital tools.
That last part is what we’re here to talk about—the digital angle on employee experience, and four essential tips to enhance it.
Digital employee experience (DEX) is the quality of an employee's interactions with the technologies they use to work, and it's become more important as digital devices have become the primary way employees connect with their organizations.
Data shows that younger generations expect the most from their digital experience at work.
Gone are the days of TPS reports and cranky fax machines (jk, TPS reports are real). Your employees today are accustomed to mobile apps and personalized experiences, and they want their workday to feel just as digitally seamless (if not more so) than their off-work hours.
A great DEX will maximize employee productivity, engagement, and retention. A poor DEX leads to attrition and operational waste, and it can even damage company reputation to prospective employees.
Said in other words, your employees’ digital experience is a critical ingredient to maximizing engagement, productivity, and retention. This makes it a critical contributor to your bottom line. Consider the following insight:
“92% of business and IT leaders say investing in DEX is among their top priorities for the next five years. Eighty-nine percent are accelerating digital experience adoption and implementation.”
- Riverbed, Global Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Survey 2023
If you haven’t thought about your DEX before, now is the time to evaluate and find enhancement opportunities. But…where should we start? What should we look out for?
Fear not, dear reader! Here are five things to keep in mind when designing your new DEX.
4 Tips to Enhance Your Digital Employee Experience
1. Consider the Employee Journey
An employee’s experience spans the entire day, from arrival to departure, regardless of whether they will work in-office or not. In order to identify our best opportunities to enhance this experience, we need to become much more familiar with what that day may look like for various types of employees.
Once we understand more about the employee’s current-day experience, we can set goals for our future experience and focus on the best ways in which digital experiences can support these goals. This will provide a strong foundation for creating our strategy and roadmap.
Tip 2: Elevate Brand and Culture
Just as the physical workplace should represent your company culture and brand perspective, your employee technologies should, too. It’s important to take advantage of opportunities to weave your corporate brand and culture throughout your employee-facing technologies. It goes a lo to cultivate a more cohesive and immersive presence at work. Look for white-labeled SaaS applications. Or go big with an entirely custom app ecosystem.
Let’s take Walmart for example. They have an employee app called Me@Walmart with a crisp and straightforward design. As a a branded and cohesive portal to daily employee tools, it echoes Walmart’s values of community and excellence. Even the copy makes you feel warm and confident.
Imagine instead that the employees had to use 6 different unbranded mobile apps to get all of their work done. It would be a mess, and it would do nothing to improve the employee experience.
In the early stages of planning, prioritize attention to opportunities to reflect your branding and company culture so that you can enhance your employee’s daily experience.
Tip 3: Make it Personal
Personalizing any digital experience enhances digital interactions and helps your user to feel more immersed in their experience. For the workplace, personalized insights on scheduling, career performance, workplace amenities, and more, engages your employee on a more intimate level and helps them feel supported and cared for. Digital experiences like these increase the value to your employee, drive increased productivity, and encourage positive emotional connection with their workday.
Personalized digital experiences can range from AI-driven insights to integrated employee “dashboards” to and just a simple “Hello, Nancy!”. It doesn’t always have to be complicated, and taking the time to craft personalized value to your employees will maximize engagement and increase satisfaction with their DEX.
Tip 4: Evaluate Current Technologies
It can be a critical error to engage in a digital initiative without understanding the capabilities, limits, and requirements of your current workplace technologies. Adopting technologies that are incompatible with your current tools can introduce sizeable risk, including wasted time and money.
In most cases, it will benefit your employee experience (and your IT team) to have a solid understanding of your current technologies. This may include hardware and software inventory, as well as internal security and compliance requirements. This will help you select and create complimentary digital products that promote a seamless digital experience.
Thorough knowledge of your current employee-facing technologies and their use in the workplace is well worth the effort, as it will help ensure that any new digital experiences are optimal candidates for implementation. For this reason, it is best to integrate IT representatives into your digital initiatives throughout the evaluation, selection, and procurement process.
Conclusion
While it can sometimes be a challenge to evaluate and enhance your digital employee experience (DEX), these four essential tips will help ensure that your initiatives are successful. Equal evaluation between the human design and digital design perspectives will drive a balanced and optimized understanding which opportunities are your best investment.
At heyZensei, we offer this blend of human and digital design in a one-stop-shop. We have 20 years of experience designing, developing, and implementing digital experiences for online and physical spaces, and we are experts at leading you through all of the tips above, plus more.
Aside from Workplace clients, we serve Retail, Entertainment, Healthcare, Mixed Use, Hospitality, Urban Environments, and other industries.
Reach out to us at info@heyzensei.com or visit our website at www.heyzensei.com.
